99BottlesOfBeerInMyF - Slashdot User

Apple Audits Suppliers, a Human Rights Win-> 0

Submitted by 99BottlesOfBeerInMyF on Thursday February 17 2011, @01:16PM

99BottlesOfBeerInMyF writes "Last week Apple published the results of their latest supplier audit (PDF) for human rights abuses. The audit itself is greatly improved from last year including specific problems found and the action taken to correct the problem; including dropping one supplier entirely.

Highlights include ten factories employing child labor, hundreds of workers poisoned by toxins, and a trend towards even more excessively long hours. While many scoff at Apple's innovation in technology, I think we can all agree they are at least innovative on the human rights front, as pretty much the only tech company to repeatedly and openly perform audits of foreign suppliers and publish the results for all to see. Love or hate Apple, we should all applaud this and pressure other companies to do the same."
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Mac App Store, Success or Not?-> 0

Submitted by 99BottlesOfBeerInMyF on Tuesday January 25 2011, @03:54PM

99BottlesOfBeerInMyF writes "The SFGate reports that the top ranking third party application in the new Mac App Store this month was Pixelmator, a $30 photo editing application that made their first $1,000,000 of sales in 20 days. That averages out to $50,000 a day. I wondered how this compared to the iPhone App Store in terms of potential income for application developers. Looking at historical data from two years ago, we see Bejeweled 2 was a top ranked app in the iPhone Apps store, which sold about 100,000 copies at $3 a piece in a similar amount of time for sales of approximately $300,000; or $15,000 a day.

I guess my take on this is that as an opportunity for profit generation, it looks like there is room for small players to become breakaway successes and earn similar amounts of profit on the Mac App Store as they have on the iPhone App Store. I'm sure some pundit will eventually perform a careful and statistical analysis of revenue/profit generation but, there does seem to be a new source of potential for profit for smaller developers looking to break into the market."
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Republicans Create Rider to Stop Net Neutrality-> 0

Submitted by 99BottlesOfBeerInMyF on Friday December 17 2010, @04:21PM

99BottlesOfBeerInMyF writes "Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-Tex.) submitted a rider yesterday to a bill on military and veterans construction projects. The Rider would, "prohibit the FCC from using any appropriated funds to adopt, implement or otherwise litigate any network neutrality based rules, protocols or standards." It is cosigned by six other, republican senators. We all knew this was coming after the last election removed most of the vocal supporters of net neutrality and supplanted them with pro-corporate republicans."
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Computing Industry Misc. Settles Antitrust Case-> 0

Submitted by 99BottlesOfBeerInMyF on Saturday September 25 2010, @11:08AM

99BottlesOfBeerInMyF writes "Adobe, Apple, Google, Intel, Intuit, & Pixar finally settled their antitrust case over illegal hiring practices according to a press release from the Justice Department. The companies apparently had a formed a cartel with an agreement to not poach employees from one another, an agreement that harmed tech employees looking for work. All companies involved agreed to dissolve those agreements and not enter into any similar agreement with other companies. Hooray for a Justice Department enforcing our antitrust laws for a change. Hopefully they'll look into those Microsoft, RIAA, and MPAA things sometime soon."
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No HTML5 Hulu Anytime Soon-> 0

Submitted by 99BottlesOfBeerInMyF on Thursday May 13 2010, @06:50PM

99BottlesOfBeerInMyF writes "The Hulu Website briefly contained a comment the other day (since removed) explaining why they would not be implementing HTML5 video for their service:

"We continue to monitor developments on HTML5, but as of now it doesn’t yet meet all of our customers' needs... Our player doesn’t just simply stream video, it must also secure the content, handle reporting for our advertisers, render the video using a high performance codec to ensure premium visual quality, communicate back with the server to determine how long to buffer and what bitrate to stream, and dozens of other things that aren't necessarily visible to the end user."

They plan to release a dedicated application for the iPad and iPhone instead, likely a paid subscription service. Perhaps this is a good sign for Web based television as it will move more users away from the single locked down channel from the networks and to more diverse options less interested in extracting subscription fees (like YouTube)."
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Webkit2-> 0

Submitted by 99BottlesOfBeerInMyF on Thursday April 08 2010, @10:06PM

99BottlesOfBeerInMyF writes "Anders Carlsson and Sam Weinig over at Apple just announced Webkit2, a rework of the Webkit engine that powers Chrome and Safari. This new version of Webkit incorporates the same style of split process model that provides stability in Chrome, but built directly into the framework so all browsers based upon Webkit will be able to gain the same level of sandboxing and stability. Appleinsider has a writeup. Both Palm and the Epiphany team are going to be happy about this."
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CSS 3 - 3D transforms come to Webkit-> 0

Submitted by 99BottlesOfBeerInMyF on Thursday July 16 2009, @12:34AM

99BottlesOfBeerInMyF writes "For some time now Apple developers have been playing with CSS3's 3D transforms for graphics in Webkit, but unless you had a copy of Snow Leopard, there was no good way to try them out. Arstechnica reports that the latest Webkit nightlies, as of last weekend, now enable this feature on Leopard, so curious developers who have OS X 10.5 (Leopard) and who are willing to download the latest Webkit, can now experience the 3D graphical goodness themselves. The transforms are offloaded to the GPU and build on the 2D transforms the Mozilla team invented and implemented. The 3D version has already been submitted to W3C as a potential new standard. Whether you have the latest Webkit or not, you can take a look at a demo of a new photo browser using the technology created by Web developer Charles Ying. The results are impressive, if a little heavy on the eye candy for my Web browsing preference."
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Maine expands laptop program, Macbooks for G 7-12-> 0

Submitted by 99BottlesOfBeerInMyF on Tuesday June 30 2009, @04:21PM

99BottlesOfBeerInMyF writes "The state of Maine announced last March their intention to expand their laptops for students program, called the Maine Learning Technology Initiative (MLTI). Since 2002 the state of Maine has provided an Apple laptop to every student in the 7th and 8th grades, one of the largest educational laptop programs of its kind. Cnet reports that the new expansion is finally rolling out, providing MacBooks for all students in the 7th through 12th grades. They currently have an order for more than 64,000 laptops with another 7,000 or so soon to be ordered along with accompanying support, services, and educational software from Apple.

Governor Baldacci is quoted as saying, "We are going to revamp our laptop program and turn it into a powerful tool for the entire family. Every night when students in seventh through 12th-grade bring those computers home, they'll connect the whole family to new opportunities and new resources." He's referring to software preloaded on the computers that connects parents to state run employment and educational resources.

Many similar programs exist around the country and the world, have experienced varying degrees of success. I wonder if such a program can be cost effective in the long run compared to the lower cost of netbooks and with the existence of educational focused Linux distributions. For now, the state seems very happy with this program and the results they've seen from it."
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Microsoft and EU Have IE Antitrust Solutions-> 0

Submitted by 99BottlesOfBeerInMyF on Thursday June 11 2009, @03:31PM

99BottlesOfBeerInMyF writes "Arstechnica reports that the European Commission is distributing a questionnaire to PC makers asking about a potential remedy for the Internet Explorer situation. Their remedy seems to favor requiring Microsoft to include alternative browsers with Windows. It asks specifically about how many and which browsers should be pre-installed with Windows. It also goes on to ask several questions about whether PC makers are being pressured by Microsoft on the IE antitrust issue.

At the same time Cnet reports that Microsoft has informed PC makers (via a memo) that they will not be shipping IE 8 included in Windows 7 within the EU for OEM versions. PC makers will need to add IE to computers they ship, if they so desire. This differs from a similar remedy the EU enforced with regard to Windows media player in that Microsoft will not be offering any version including IE to OEMs within the EU.

It seems from the difference here that Microsoft is attempting to cut their losses within the EU and voluntarily commit to measures to limit the market damage of bundling IE, in the hopes that the EU's stricter measures will then be abandoned. In this way Microsoft can continue with business as usual outside of the EU and with regard to Win XP and Vista and count on IE's large market share in the rest of the world to persuade PC Makers to include it within the EU as well. Obviously this is less of a threat than an EU remedy that forces the inclusion of alternative browsers within the EU, giving Web developers there the option of targeting something other than IE. One thing is certainly clear, the EU commission and Microsoft have differing plans that have not been reconciled."
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OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard) Announced-> 0

Submitted by 99BottlesOfBeerInMyF on Monday June 08 2009, @02:44PM

99BottlesOfBeerInMyF writes "Appleinsider's coverage of the WWDC notes, "Apple on Monday offered attendees at its annual developer conference an overview of its nearly finalized Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard operating system, which the company said will be available in September as a $29 upgrade for users of Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard." In addition to the approximate release date and price, the article details some of the features and improvements in the Snow Leopard update to OS X. These include: performance enhancements, 64 applications, smaller footprint, Exchange support, updated "Cocoa" Finder, some minor UI improvements, Safari 4, and a new version of Quicktime."
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